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IO 2023
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**For Founders, CMO’s & Ecom Managers Of 7-Figure Fashion

Brands Only**

The State Of Fashion: How We Scaled A High-End

Fashion Brand to $3.6M While Building Their In-House
Growth Team
Dear fashion brand founder, CMO or ecomm manager.

After scaling over 20+ fashion brands, speaking with over 100, and analysing thousands…

I found some common denominators between those who ‘get it’...

And those who can only copy.

Look…

98% of fashion brands have it all backwards.

they believe:

🦄 the fairytales sold by marketing agencies

🥱 that they ‘are not ready yet’ to bring marketing in-house
🤷🏼‍♀️ online marketing is too complicated to be done in-house
Which is all nonsense!

Look, i get it, you’re already juggling 5 hats and still feeling like you’re blindfolded 👩🏼‍🦯
But agencies are not the answer.

In fact, agencies are the detriment of your growth:

1. To be very frank, agencies are flat-out incompetent

2. They don't understand your company like you or your team does.
3. They don't care as much.
4. They have 7 different clients to be bothered with
5. Execution is inefficient, scattered and prone to errors

And you probably figured that out already yourself...

It's why I created Ecomgrowth.io

Our mission: Empowering fashion brands to take charge over their growth, by integrating their
marketing team.

Unlike most 1-trick pony agencies, specialists and consultants, we understand that growth is a
wholistic process.

AND, we understand fashion.

(hint: it's wildly different then your standard 'ecom').

"So Thijs, how does it work?"

Here's the typical growth roadmap:

1. We improve your website conversion rate using some simple tweaks.

2. We help with product positioning to improve the average order value.

3. We setup AND optimise your email & SMS marketing flows for better retention.

4. We build the 'creative assembly line' so you never run out of high-profit ad creatives.

5. We help you scale on 1 ad platform, and then go omni-channel ASAP.

6. We integrate the full funnel analytics dashboard, so you have 1 centralised place for making
decisions.

And the best thing is:

We do this, while building your in-house growth team, so you'll never have to hire an agency
again.

That’s our promise.

But before we talk business, I want to share with you everything I’ve learned over the past 7 years
of figuring it out in fashion, ecommerce & marketing.

So here we go!

2023: Current Trends In Fashion Industry

Fashion is the biggest market within online DTC (direct to consumer)

According to Statista, the ecommerce fashion industry’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is
tipped to reach 14.2% between 2017 and 2025, with the industry hitting a $1 trillion valuation by
2024.

Sales of apparel, footwear, and accessories continue to rise, hitting $204.9 billion in the US alone.
That’s tipped to grow by 13% this year, with consumers set to spend $204.9 billion on fashion items
online.
Fashion industry is leading total adspend (within DTC)
At $153.49 million, Clothing & apparel was by far the highest spending DTC ad-category in Q2
2022. (That’s excluding jewellery, accessories & shoes)

Rise of the “challenger” brand

It’s never been easier in the history of the world to start a fashion brand. Nowadays, people can
dropship prototypes from Aliexpress or print-on-demand stores, setup a store in 1 day, and launch
ad campaigns on day 2.

Once product market fit is found, the process to becoming a challenger brand is a matter of
months/years as opposed decades. There’s an abundance of access to capital, but if done right, the
process can even be bootstrapped by the founder and 1-2 operators.

Hence: competition has never been more fierce

Thousands of new ‘me-too’ brands are flooding the market every month, copycatting your designs,
your website, your ads etc.

Consumer Trend: DTC.

Consumers want to buy directly from the brand and be closer to the brand. Fashion is no longer
purely a product, brands need to understand they represent a tribe of loyal customers, an ideal the
consumer wants to identify with. The consumer doesn’t want to be told, it wants to speak. She
doesn’t want to buy, she wants to contribute.

Fashion can no longer be secretive

Long gone are the days where fashion brands could hide behind their PR, shows & retail shops.
The consumer wants to know the story, the story behind the story, and if it’s in accordance with their
identity. Transparency has become the standard rather than the exception.

This has led to a powershift from the corporation towards the consumer. If they feel somethings off,
they’ll simply go to your competitor who they feel more certain with.

eCommerce = Future
According to Statista, the ecommerce fashion industry’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is
tipped to reach 14.2% between 2017 and 2025, with the industry hitting a $1 trillion valuation by
2024.

Sales of apparel, footwear, and accessories continue to rise, hitting $204.9 billion in the US alone.
That’s tipped to grow by 13% this year, with consumers set to spend $204.9 billion on fashion items
online.
CPM’s are increasing
Limited adspace and more advertisers flocking to the online ad platforms is driving the cost of
advertising up year over year.

It’s like Moore’s law, CPM’s (cost per 1000 impressions) will always keep rising every year no
matter what.

If you’re paying $100 to acquire a new customer now, that price is most likely going to move up to
$150 next year (all else being equal).

Mediabuying is obsolete
With the rise of A.I. technology the adplatforms are becoming smarter, and hence more simplified
from the users perspective.

Most of the decisions formerly made by a’specialist mediabuyer’ (or agency), are now being made
by the A.I. powered algorithms of the adplatform. The adplatform decides who to show your ad to,
because the adplatform knows best.

The role of the mediabuyer has become more or less obsolete, in today’s world, mediabuying is just
a matter of clicking a few buttons to upload your ad to the adplatform.

Anyone can do it.

Rise of influencer-led brands (skims, frankies, yeezy’s, nocta)

ROAS has never been the whole story.

While roas gives you an idea of the direct result of your ads, it’s not an effective metric anymore to
monitor performance. With constant rising adcosts (CPM), ROAS is becoming irrelevant, as real
profit comes from the returning customer purchases.

You now have to optimize for blender marketing efficiency ratio (MER). Looking at the total sales of
your ecommerce, measuring against all it’s marketing costs.

As you scale keep : Measuring your cost per new acquired customer against the average customer
life time value

Customer loyalty is #1 driver for profit and long term growth.

High average order value (AOV) helps a “store”, but customer lifetime value (LTV) carries a brand.
Recap of 2023 Trends

● More & more differentiated ‘me-too’ competition is flocking the market everyday.
● Everyone is shifting to online (including the big brands).
● The cost to advertise is increasing year on year.
● Mediabuying is now done by the algorithm instead of the agency/mediabuyer

These used to be competitive advantages on which the independent fashion brand could thrive on.

Nowadays, they are the standard for everyone.

So how do you differentiate from your competitors?

How To Compete In Fashion (2023).

To compete on the advertising level of the business, you can only do 2 things.

(1) Lower the cost per user & (2) increase the revenue per user.
 ● Where user is a ‘unique website visitor’
● The costs are paid to the adplatforms
● And the revenue is made on the webstore.

Mediabying skills no-longer drives the cost per new website visitor down, it’s more or less equal for
everyone.

The cost per user in the adplatform is calculated by:

CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) x CTR (unique click through rate) = Cost per unique click.

Hence: cost per unique click = more or less equal to the cost per new visitor.

To lower the cost per unique click:

→ You have to create better ads, more frequently.

The adplatforms favors the advertiser who shows ads that are more enjoyed by the platforms users.
And hence drives down it’s CPM.

Moreover, having more people click on your ad, drives down your cost per click.

If the ad is really good, it inspires buying behaviour even before landing on the website and hence
drives conversion rate up.

To increase the revenue per visitor:

→ 1. Increase your websites conversion rate through CRO (conversion rate optimization).

→ 2. Increase the average order value of your customers through CRO, offer & pricing.

→ 3. Increase the return customer rate of your store through email-, sms-, retention marketing.

This document will show exactly how to accomplish these things.

But before we go over the practical details, you first have to understand the unique position of the
fashion brand.

How fashion is different from general DTC ecommerce

The fashion product is highly dynamic
Unlike most DTC industries, the fashion product is always changing with each new season. You
may have some best seller products in spring, but in summer you start all over again with a new
collection.

Seasonality
Where most DTC categories have a consistent demand all year round, many categories in fashion
are highly infleunced by seasonality, take swimwear (spring/summer), athleisure (new-years,
spring/summer) & jewellery (christmas/winter) for example).

Sales are highly dependent on forces outside of the product

Take Apple, Tesla or Dollar Shave Club. Sales are coming from havig a great product and offer.
While this may partly be similar with fashion, the presentation of your product highly influences
sales.

The models you choose, the experience of the photographer and the setting for the shoot are all
part of the product. Put a Skims dress on a B-class model, take away the influencers & have an
inexperience photographer mess up the lightning and setting, and it will never reach a similar result
in sales.

Product is less differentiated.

Most DTC ecommerce brands rely on product differentiation. Either a completely new segment is
invented, product is positioned differently or it’s unique selling points are differentiated.

With fashion, there’s only so much you can do to differentiate your collection, and most USP’s are
generally the same over a category or sub-niche (sustainable, supporting, shapewear, quality,
functionality etc).

Fashion product differentiation is to a certain degree limited to style. And from there it spoils over
into how you position it online.

80% of the fashion business leans on the visual aspect

The fashion business heavily relies on it’s content. Yes you can write some great lines of copy to
resonate more with your audience, but 80% of the sale is made on what you present visually. You’ll
never sell swimsuit, bag or bra just by writing copy. It needs visual representation to make the sale.

Brand culture is formed through social media and influencers

Brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. Where brand culture used to be formed
through advertising, fashion shows, retail representation and PR, – nowadays it’s shifted to social
media, influencers & communities.

To differentiate your brand, create the culture & influence the gu-feeling your customer has about
your brand, you have to be smart about how influence the online sphere.
The Agency Fallacy

In order to grow a fashion brand, you can no longer rely on agencies.

There is a time and place for using third party help, but when it comes to the growth of your
business…

You have to take matters into your own hands.

It may surprise you, but as an ex-agency owner myself…

I’m telling you:

FIRE YOUR AGENCY.

Here’s why agencies are sucking the life out of your business:

Knowledge leaves out of the backdoor with the last agency

In any department of a business there is a learning curve. Once you outsource departments to
agencies, the learning curve of what works and doesn’t with your specific brand will leave out of the
backdoor at the end of the partnership. And you’ll start all over again.

The Agencies Motivational Mismatch

While you are optimizing for your own long term position in the market, your agency is optimizing for
their own direct profit. Even with revenue share incentive structure, the agency will always optimize
for what is best for them, instead of what’s best for you.

Inverse flywheel effect of the agency

99% of agencies (especially paid advertising agencies) start out not having a clue with what they
are doing. (It’s true, I was there too).
However, if you do find yourself in the rare occasion of having an agency who is great at what they
do, they’ll most likely sign more clients, diversify their attention and lose focus on your brand.

Communication inefficiency
Working with more outside parties, the string of communication is longer, people don’t have full
information, and don’t speak as much as with an inhouse team.

Agencies are further removed from the product, have less information or receive information later,
making the process inefficient and prone to errors.

Take a paid advertising agency for example.

Simple avoidable errors are made by the agency everywhere, and all the time…

(1) scaling ad creatives to products which are out of stock

(2) sending traffic to the wrong product page

(3) referring to the wrong product name in an ad

(4) and so on…

All mediabuying (and marketing) is becoming simplified

Especially when it comes to advertising, you really don’t need an agency, as this should be done by
the founder or CMO & could be managed within less then 4 hours per week (up to $300k/mo) or be
a part-time side responsibility by anyone on the marketing team for 10-20h/week (up to $1M/mo).
I’ve been advertising for 7 years on Facebook & Instagram now, and I can tell you with full
confidence:

It’s never been as easy to run ads profitably as it is today.

Now if you don’t feel the same about that…

Then simply keep reading, so we can change that today.

The New Comptetive Advantage: An In-House Growth Team

The in-house growth team replaces the position of the collection of freelancers and
agencies.

In the early days it may consist of just the founder and 1 operator.

Later down the line it may just be 1 CMO with 1 tech-savvy operator and 1 creative person for
writing copy editing creatives.

All the way up to having a small team of 6-8 people doing multi 8-figures collectively.

The in-house growth team will take care of everything ecommerce:

● Website updating
● Editing product images/descriptions
● Paid advertising
● Influencer management
● Analytics
● Conversion rate optimization
● Email marketing
● And more…

Here’s how the in-house growth team will rule over agencies any day of the week:

Motivational Alignment
The in-house growth team is focused 1 thing only: your business. They win, when you win.

Closer to the product & consumer

The in-house growth team is closer to the product, the customer, the brand. They understand your
business infinitely better then an outside party ever will.
“Standing in the shower thoughts”
Because they are focused on 1 thing, they’ll be daydreaming/thinking up ideas subconsciously all
day long regarding YOUR business, as opposed to an agency being bothered by their own, and
then their 10 other clients too.

Speed of execution
Everything happens much faster as communication, feedback loops & collaboration is much tighter.
Someone has a great idea in the morning, it’s live by noon, and feedback from the market is there
within the next days, which can be implemented the moment it’s in.

Creative power
Your in-house team knows who are the models, they know the influencers and could spot the
individual products in an instant, and can give you their stock, sales numbers & unique different
qualities, facts etc on the spot.

Not only does this make the marketing process less prone to errors… The amount of creative power
this knowledge unleashes is unsurmountable by any level of skill of an outside party or agency.

My Story + How I Got Here & Future Plans

So let’s address the elephant in the room: why should you trust what I’ve got to say.
Background
I grew up in the Netherlands, being surrounded by fashion (my mother has 20+ years experience as
a buyer & manager for numerous mens fashion brands doing manufacturing, buying, selling &
retailing) And after fashion, she became photographer – I literally grew up with a studio setup rolled
out in the living room :) My dad is a growth consultant, and those 2 people set me up perfectly for
my future.

First business: sunglasses brand

At 17 years old (2015), I started my first business, a fashion brand (vintage sunglasses), took me 2
years but I grew it to 30k/mo in online sales.
Note: (left to right) the fashion brand IG from where most sales were done, me working in 5x5 studio
me and my friend were living in, we worked days and nights, screenshot from Shopify dashboard).

Transition
I found that the product, operations, design & manufacturing is not as much my thing as the
marketing & branding aspect of the business was.

So I ditched the brand

Agency
And started my an agency, naturally I attracted lots of fashion brands (not my intention but so be it).

I ran that for 3 years, got some great case studies and good results for many brands, of which most
of them in fashion.

First ‘Exit’
Sold my agency after noticing the incongruencies of the agency model, it didn’t make sense to me
from an integrity point of view, besides that, I experienced from close up how stressfull it is for
founders to let go of their baby and put it into the hands of a total stranger (the agency).

I kept 2 clients on a consulting basis, it didn’t make economical sense for them to hire an agency,
and they already had a CMO and a creative person on the team. So we decided on consulting.
One of them, a sustainable surfing-wesuit brand, I helped the founder run ads themselves, he went
from 0 to product market fit, and they needed time off to find investors, figure out
operations/logistics, and launch a new website (they’re doing quite well right now with their in-house
team).

The other brand…

Within a week after working with me, their results skyrocketed (4x/5x normal monthly revenues)
they did extremely well without the help of outside agencies, besides my occasional consulting
calls.

My other business
In the meantime I started consulting other agencies how to grow their business, but kept being
bothered by the misalignment of their business model (the agency fallacy).

Back to swimwear
During the span of 4 months, the swimwear brand grew from 0 to $100k/mo, still completely
self-reliant without hiring any mediabuyers or external help from agencies (even their website they
had build themselves in the Shopify no-code theme builder).

They reach out to me later, wanting more help scaling it further and we scaled the business from
$100k to $250k/mo in less then 3 months.

My other business
In the meantime of those 12 months, I started consulting other agencies how to grow their business,
but I kept being bothered by the misalignment of their business model (see the agency fallacy
earlier mentioned).

My new phase
I then realized the opportunity: All these fashion brands being bothered by agencies, they don’t
need none of that, they’d be much more successful bringing it in-house.

I shifted my focus back to fashion brands and I’m now fully focused on helping fashion brands take
their marketing in-house.

I also decided to dive deep into the world of fashion:

● I read every fashion related book I could get my hands on.

● watched all the Masterclass.com trainings on fashion (Sarah Blakely, Anna Wintour etc)

● watched the movies (Saint Laurent my favorite),

● listened to the podcasts,

 ● subscribed to the newsletters (BOF),

● and watched the interviews with founders of the next-generation of fashion brands among
others: Natalie Massenet (Net a Porter) , Emma Grede (Skims), Virgil Abloh (Off White) etc.

● Visited Paris for fashion week, attended some parties and pop-ups, met really cool people.

However… Although all of these things helped me understand the world of fashion better…

Surprisingly, I could barely find anything of practical value for the (online) growth of an independent
fashion brand.

And I came to an apparent conclusion:

Right now, there’s NOTHING available for (aspiring) fashion founders to learn how to effectively
grow a fashion brand.

Yes, there’s loads of trainings on ecommerce, and some old school university classes and corporate
conferences on fashion manufacturing, operations & design.

But there’s not a single book, podcast, course, whitepaper or agency that integrates both
worlds together and show you how to effectively scale a fashion brand from 0-$10M and
beyond. NONE.

And so it’s our mission to change that:

To empower fashion founders with the vision, tools & knowledge to take charge over the growth of
their brand.

Right now, we are the ONLY growth agency & learning platform focused entirely on fashion
brands, helping them scale by bringing their marketing in-house.

Consulting Case Study: From 0-$250k/mo Sustainable Swimwear Brand

Below you can find an in-depth case study of how we’ve scaled a high-end, sustainable swimwear
brand from 0 to $250k/mo →

Find separate doc here: Case Study: 0-$3M/year High-End Swimwear Brand

Or see below (it’s the same thing).

Key statistics:
 ● From 0 to $250k/mo in website revenue.
● Website conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% (50% increase(!))
● Email marketing 30% better deliverability, 80% revenue growth
● 1500% increase in organic engagement on socials

Overview of 0-$3M/year Swimwear Brand Case Study

In this section I’m showing the practical steps we took to scale a high-end swimwear brand from 0
to 250k/mo (and growing).

They did it without any help of outside agencies, just our weekly consulting calls, audits &
recommendations.

Occasionally we went in to make some changes, but we weren’t running things for them
permanently.

Therefore, all credit goes to the incredible team of this brand, we were merely their compass to
show them in what direction they should go.

The marketing team was already in place, but did not have any prior education, experience or track
record in the topics of scaling fashion brands vertically: (email marketing, paid advertising,
conversion rate optimization, brand building etc).

All we did was directing their attention to the right places, and setup systems properly so things can
run by themselves.

If you’re curious if your current marketing team can 10x their output, and wondering if it
would be viable to fire your agency and take things in-house, feel free to book in a call with
me personally here: https://www.ecomgrowth.io/ecomgrowth-thanks

1. Overal brand strategy

● Identified the unique positioning of this swimwear brand and helped with directing the
models, creatives & copywriting of all media to align with the brand positioning.

● Stopped doing sales, outlets, promotions, which helped keep sales consistent and train
customers not to wait for sales but just to pay full price for a quality item they wanted.

● Identified the strategy to compete with b2b wholesaling partners.

 ○ An often occurring phenomenon is fashion brands trying to grow vertically by scaling
the adspend, but having all their paid traffic go to the e-retailer and buy the prodcuts
there (because of trust, shipping cost, better refund policy etc), and losing resources
in the process (faulty tracking & attribution, and losing profit to the wholesalers
markup) – wholesalers should be a advertising for themselves, that’s why they get
the markup.

2. Optimized Email Marketing

After making a full account audit, we created an A-Z report with action steps to improve the results
for email marketing.

Note: 60% increase in revenue generated from Klaviyo (email marketing)

● Fixed deliverability problem i.e. staying out of spam, improved by 30%+

○ Less images in the emails – change to GIF’s.

○ Stop sending to recipients who haven’t opened 10+ emails in a row.

Note: improved bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and spamrate.

 ● This increased open rate (from 18% to 35%)
○ Started A/B testing subject lines too to further increase it and find winning templates.

Note: 32% increase in open rate on 12 months timeframe

● A/B tested Form Signup (and it went from 2.9% to 4.4% signup conversion)

And it’s done with 5 minutes of work, 2 or 3 times per year.

Note: (successfull stores do 1-3% opt-in rate for forms)

Note: change in results sign up form.

While a difference of 1.5% doesn’t sound like much, on a store with 100.000 visitors per month, this
means en extra 1500 people subscribed to the list, going through the brand-integration campaigns
and a part of them being turned in to loyal customers.

● Setup automated flows:

■ Created brand-integration flow (welcome flow for new signups)
■ Improved abandonment cart flow
■ Setup customer winback flow
■ Setup post purchase email flow
Note: 80% increase in revenue from flows (an extra $120k over 12 months).

3. Website Conversion Rate optimization

A 0.5% in conversion rate seems like nothing, but let me show you how it’s one of the most
high-leverage activities you can do.

In this case: increasing the conversion rate from 1% to 1.5% on a store with 100,000 monthly
visitors leads to an extra 500 customers.

500 customers at a $200 AOV brings in an extra $100,000 every month, without spending a penny
more on marketing.

Most CMO’s and founders of fashion brands never think about conversion rate optimization.

Those who do believe it either requires a complete theme makeover, or having to perform
‘black-hat’ sales tricks in copywriting like ‘countdown timers, low stock messages and other crap.

I’m here to tell you that none of that is true.

Although in some cases a new theme can do wonders…

You can increase your conversion rate by over 40% simply by making the shopping experience
better for the customer.

Here’s what we did:

● I personally went into the Shopify theme editor and Implemented small & simple
tweaks to improve the checkout and cart process (increased conversion rate 45%)
 ● Then consulted on conversion implementations for the launch of new website
(increased conversion rate another 21%)

● Helped with the ‘offer’ to increase average order value to $230

○ Free shipping threshold + Reconvert post purchase upsells

● Implemented a strategy for effectively A/B testing on:

○ Collections, Product images, Descriptions, Product page designs, Home page
designs etc.
○ Installed Hotjar + Google Optimize to initiate the tests and monitor results.

● A/B testing is ongoing with the aim to increase conversion another 50%.

4. Scaling Meta Ads

● Meta Ads went from spending about $500/mo boosting instagram posts, to doing an 20x
ROAS within the first 30 days (Meta Spend to Shopify Revenue ROI)

Note: MER = marketing efficiency ratio → spend vs gross Shopify revenue.

 ● Over the span of 12 months we helped with further scaling up the spend towards $2000/day
at a consistent 6-10 MER (marketing efficiency ratio – $1 in $6-$10 out)

5. Creatives optimization
● Probably the most valuable part during the consulting period was identifying what ads were
working, and helping the team understand the importance of frequency of new creatives.

● We could then iterate on what was working, and created ‘winning ad templates’ – simple
structures of ad creatives that we know will perform.

● We split tested landing pages, models, products, individual products vs multiple products in
an ad, placements & format (story, reels, feed).

● We monitor the click-through rate, CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and cost per purchase
to decide which ads are winning.

6. Omnipresence through Tiktok Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads,

Twitter Ads.
● Once Meta ads was performing, we started setting up the ad accounts for the other
platforms.

● Going omnipresence is a low-risk, high reward move because 9/10 times you’ll be profitable
right out of the gate – you start with low adspend so it’s easy for the adplatform to be super
profitable on the small pool of people that are highly resonating with your brand. From here
you can find out how profitable you can stay while increasing the adspend.

● Google performed at 7.9x ROAS instantly

Note: Google ads showing a 7.9x ROAS and $25 cost per purchase ($230 Avg Order Value)

● TikTok’s pixel & platform learning phase is longer, started at a $100 cost per purchase, went
to $75 and is currently climbing down towards $50 just in the first 60 days after launch.

● Pinterest & Twitter in process. (Yes, Twitter is a gold mine, completely underutilized,
currently 20x cheaper then Facebook & Instagram to advertise on, super easy to setup
where visual ads perform better, so don’t worry about having to ‘tweet’ your way to success)

7. Influencer marketing
● Installed and setup the process to launch GRIN, this helped:
○ Identify influencers (100k+ following) from the current customer base, these people
are already introduced to the brand and sometimes may already be raving fans.

○ Find new influencers of which the GRIN database has identified has
overlap/resonance with the current customer base.

○ Streamlined the management of influencers: agreements, contact, proposals,

commissions & pay-outs, 1-click order fulfillment for sending influencers product etc

○ Setup the attribution system for tracking which orders came from the audience of
which influencers.

8. Analytics & Attribution

● Installed and setup TripleWhale for ad-attribution tracking:
○ Identify where sales are really coming from, and which channel was responsible for
the sale. All the way down to the specific ad and adset that was responsible for the
 sale, so we’re not relying on faulty data to wrongfully spend on adsets which are
unprofitable (or missing out on scaling adsets that are profitable).

○ Identify audience segments, allowing us to use a specific segments to create

look-a-like audiences for ads, or create specific audience for Klaviyo email marketing
campaigns (for example a list of our biggest spenders, we want to have look a likes
of those, and treat them different than newbie customers in our email marketing).

○ Stock updater: TripleWhale notifies us when best sellers are going out of stock, how
much we should restock and the missed revenue of not restocking (in-time). It also
notifies us which specific ads we should stop scaling so we’re not pushing ads
containing out of stock products.

9. Organic engagement on Instagram grew 1500%

● This was not our doing, but simply a restructure in the team to bring it back in-house, team
was more apt for the job and singlehandedly took average like count from 200 likes per post
to 3000-4000 likes per post.

● Improved Meta ads may have helped in the process.

Our Done With You Service: Fashion Brand Accelerator

Growing fashion brands online can be broken down into 3 key metrics:

1. Traffic: More website visitors, at a lower cost.

2. Conversion Rate: More orders from the same amount of traffic.
3. Retention: Having more customers, re-order more often.

This is dry results you see on the forefront, behind these KPI’s is a lot of strategy, creativity &
collaboration.

Also, there’s 2 parts to improving these results.

Part 1 – improving your brand image, product & resonating better with your customers (tribe).

Part 2 – a simple set of action (technical and creative) that you either implement once, or
continuously that will naturally lead to improved results.
How you run your brand is up to you, we can advice here and there, but most of that is your
ownership.

What we do is to make sure you nail Part 2, so you’re growing fast and profitable enough to have all
the peace of mind & time to focus on your brand, product & tribe.

1. Traffic: We build the traffic infrastructure to get you hyper-profitable

ad-traffic.

● We help you scale your most profitable channel first (often Meta ads).

● Then help you go omnichannel as soon as this is possible, allowing you to capitalize on
young (cheaper) ad platforms, diversifying your spend, locating possible scaling channels &
having a sense of ‘omnipresence’ to improve your brands perceived authority.

● We don’t do done-for-you creatives, instead, we help you build the creatives assembly line,
so you’re never relying on outside parties for the most important thing in your business:
creatives.

● We setup the attribution tracking so that we’re using data to correctly understand exactly
what is working and what is not, from channel all the way down to ad-level creatives.

2. Conversion: We give your website a “minimum viable” make-over to

improve conversion.

● Upon onboarding we’ll do a full website audit and deliver a ‘quick wins checklist’: these are
small tweaks that have proven with our partner brands to create a smoother shopping
experience, have your customers buy more products and as a result instantly improve your
conversion rate and average order value.

● Part of the delivered checklist we can install done-for-you within 7 days, so (in most cases)
you’ll see an instant 5-15% increase in revenue without spending a dime more on ads, right
after onboarding.

● For the remainder of the checklist we’ll work together with your developer or give you access
to one of our partner developers to implement these simple tweaks.
 ● For long-term conversion rate optimization (6-12months): We build the A/B testing strategy
and roadmap, setup the tech to allow for simple A/B tests and analysing shopper behaviour,
then hand it off to your team/cmo/developer to execute the tests over time.

3. Retention: We help setup the technical and creative infrastructure to

increase your “returning customer rate”.

● Retention comes down to strong branding and tribe-building, and then having the right tech
in place to make sure the relevant messages are delivered to your customers at the right
time.

● We perform a full email/SMS marketing account audit, and create a checklist with the simple
action steps to take in order to improve deliverability, segmentation, open and click-through
rates, improve full funnel tracking and attribution and setup the roadmap and strategy for
A/B testing etc.

● We’ll map out your automated email/SMS flows (or improve existing), making sure they are
both highly converting and all congruent with the overal branding message.

● We consult on your organic growth and deliverability on all social platforms.

The 4 months process:

● Upon onboarding we create a custom 4 month growth roadmap, including all the KPI goals
and attached action items to complete in order to hit your goals.

● While scaling your business, we help bring marketing in-house & train the team: in some
cases this means just the founder and CMO/ecom manager, in other instances it may mean
help bring in an in-house mediabuer/analyst, CMO & marketing creative director.

● Done-for-you: We setup paid ads cahnnels, email marketing, creatives assembly line,
influencer strategy & website conversion rate optimization

● Done-for-you: Install analytics for CRO, paid ads and customer research (buying behaviour
& stock predictions)

● Done-with-you: In the first month you may benefit from having us (partly) do paid advertising
for you, but once we find the optimum selling system (OSS) we will gradually hand parts of it
off to you and your team, and keep being involved on a consultative basis.
 ● We keep consulting you during the whole partnership on anything that contributes to the
growth of your business (i.e. all things mentioned above).

Delivery: The 4-Month Consulting Sprint.

● You and your team members have 4 months full access to myself & my team. Meaning 24/7
support support on Slack and 2 scheduled 30m-1h consulting calls per week.

● Life-time access to our protocol, SOP’s, checklist and video trainings. So you keep
benefitting from us even after we’re long gone, and have protocols in place to train new
team members and keep them in check for hitting KPI’s.

● During the 4 months sprint, we will perform custom audits and you’ll receive simple, practical
reports on all parts regarding growth of your business: email marketing, paid advertising
strategy per channel, CRO & influencer marketing.

If you’re curious if your current marketing team can 10x their output, and wondering if it
would be viable to fire your agency and take things in-house, feel free to book in a call with
me personally here: https://www.ecomgrowth.io/ecomgrowth-thanks

Frequently Asked Questions

I already work with a performance marketing agency

Then you are like many of our customers before. Especially IF you are already working with an
agency, you need this all the more urgently in order to be able to get the maximum out of your
contract period. Marketing is often relocated in-house after going through our process in order to
save the costs for an external agency and to be able to regain full control over marketing.

Do I need to hire more teammembers to bring marketing in-house?

If your brand is doing $1M+ in yearly revenue 9/10 sufficient team is already in place. From
$1M-$5M annual revenue it simply comes down to training, restructuring and giving more
responsibility to the team that’s already in place.

The mediabuying part (paid ads/influencers) of the growth process does not take more then
1-3h/week and no more then 15h/week with a revenue of $5M ARR+. Hence it’s absolutely absurd
to hire an expensive agency just to click a couple of buttons and draw some ‘wet finger in the air’
conclusions on results.
You can get started right now, and as you scale up it will become apparent where you need to make
hires (part-time or full-time). We help with identifying, hiring and training those hires once necessary.

Do I really need to fire my agency to work with you?

Look, 9/10 you’re wasting a lot of time and resources working with a (paid advertising, email
marketing, creatives or influencer marketing) agency. But, in the rare case where you’ve found a
perfect agency-fit in any of these verticals, and you want to stick with them, that is totally fine and
we can easily cater our service to work alongside any of your current agencies. Note that we will not
be competing with them, if they are doing paid advertising we won’t touch that part of your business,
we just empower what they are already doing, improving the parts surrounding their area of
expertise.

What exactly are you doing now?

Legitimate question keeping in mind the the amount of content presented. We are a Fashion
eCommerce growth partner and help our customers to incorporate all what is mentioned in this
thesisand much more. We place our customers on every imaginable ad platform, blast the adspend
as profitable as possible, set up the team structure, recruit employees, optimize warehouse
logistics, position the brand, decrease refunds & returns, and, if desired, initiate and implement the
EXIT process.

Is this also suitable for me if I already make more than €10 million in annual sales?
At this level you are our absolute dream customer. Product Market Fit is in place, relatively large
scaling achieved and now it's about the really big numbers. The establishment of a lean and
efficient in-house structure is particularly important for you. Fashion brands of this size hire us to
become completely independent of agencies and set up an in-house performance marketing
department.

Does this also work if I'm just starting out?

We explicitly do not work with brands that are just starting out, because capital andMarket eligibility
are still questionable. Our condition is a 7-digit annual turnover (wheater that is B2B or directly from
your website sales. Although in some cases partnership may work with a high 5-digit monthly
turnover and a clear upward growth curve. We are a premium solution for the top 3% of the market
and don't want to dilute our service with cheaper options. If you are not yet at this level, our free
content is specifically created for you, where we are continously sharing insights and training on
how to grow your fashion brand to this level.
What is the catch?
Of course there is a catch: on this page you only see results from companies that were suitable for
cooperation. For every success story, there's an average of five rejections and disappointments
from brands we've unfortunately not been able to work with. This is exactly why a list of
requirements is queried every time an appointment is booked, and every demo call includes a
qualifying component to check whether a collaboration makes sense. We don't work with anyone
we’re not 100% sure of that we can bring massive added value.

Do you sell coaching or videocourse?

No. Group coaching and automated video courses are truly worth their weight in gold for beginners
and generic skills, but fail in demanding use cases due to a lack of individualization. We work
exclusively "hands on" in 1-1 with our customers and give undivided attention.

How much time and energy is required?

Of course, the duration and effort vary from customer to customer. If you really want to make a heck
of a lot of money with a fashion brand, you're going to have to get your hands dirty, that's the
hard-hitting truth. Anyone who doesn't see this fact will sooner or later have the same experience
after all the work has been taken over by agencies, but it is then only done in-house and the whole
mountain of work has not even started. If you already have employees in different areas, this time
expenditure is even reduced and distributed among them.

What is your success rate? What is the ROI?

So far we’ve only have 2 instances where results were not as expected, these cases were caused
by the infancy of the brand (0 customer base, starting from scratch) and therefore we’ve set stricter
measures on who we work with. We are confident that if we find you to be the right fit, we can make
an incredible ROI for you on our services, however, we never promise results as there are countless
of factors outside of our control that can effect results. As mentioned earlier, our future goals bias us
to keep a strong relationship with you and keep up a great reputation, this is what forces us to go
all-in with every singel partnership we engage in.

How long will our business relationship last?

We offer a 4-month sprint to reach the first set of milestones including integrating the in-house
growth team. From here your growth is completely independent from our support and you’ll never
have to work with another agency for the growth of your business. Although you won’t need us,
we’ve found that after this initial period customers want to have us stick around on a lower-tier
consulting basis, in this respect we set new milestones every quarter. We have several customers
working with us for several years now. This however, is completely optional and we’ll never set you
up in a situation where you are dependent on us for your growth.
Do you also do internationalization?
If your brand currently operates in the US and you finally want to internationalize, we are the best
contact for you, because we have already successfully implemented this project several times and
have found all the mistakes that you will encounter sooner or later. To truly serve multiple countries
respectably, Marketing & Creative departments need to be integrated to collaborate with each other.
That's exactly what we do.

Are my competitors also with you? I don't want to give any insights
Our customers enjoy cross-category exclusivity. Your competitors operating in same geographic
location cannot work with us during this time and we agree to extreme levels of non-disclosure
agreements (NDAs).

Can I speak to some of your customers?

Out of respect for the time and privacy of our customers, we only give out direct contact details to
interested parties who meet our requirements in a demo call. If you have spoken to us, everything
fits and then want to speak to a few references, we are happy to establish contact for maximum
transparency. However, we require a clear commitment to eliminate time wasters.

What makes you different from competitor XYZ?

Most agencies or coaching companies out there offer isolated solutions for specific use cases.
Targeted UGC Ads, TikTok Ads Media Buying or pure email marketing. We believe that the time for
isolated solutions is over and that a holistic approach is the future. In addition, we are a
comprehensive growth partner for fashion brands specifically, who can solve everything from A - Z,
including recruiting.

Plus, we are the only growth partner in the world right now specifically dedicated to fashion brands.
The marketing of fashion is completely different then from general ecommerce DTC industries and

If you give out all your content for free, what do we get in the collaboration?
We don't want to keep any information secret, but rather disclose everything we do. Knowledge,
documents and SOPs can be shared - the direct application and competence is only available from
us. In addition, knowledge alone is of no use, it is about individual adaptation to the specific use
case. So if you want to be in the fast lane when it comes to using the content, come to us.
Can you help with problems like payment providers, blocked ad accounts, etc.?
We have a huge network of problem solvers for exactly these use cases. Paypal Holds, Banned Ad
Accounts, Declining Customer Feedback Score, Banned Google Merchant Centers are all issues
that no longer bother our customers as they are finally resolved.

Can you help with inventory forecasting?

Yes, we have experience with forecasting models and will help you setup with one of our partner
softwares to not only make better buying decisions for new collections (sizes/colours etc) and
restocking quantities, but also create a reporting dashboard to avoid scaling ads that are (going) out
of stock and automatically notify you on what/how much to restock when.

Our biggest pain is creatives… Can you help?

Creatives are the core of your fashion brand, and the success of it’s growth. Instead of providing the
customer with a lot of irrelevant content pieces, we build a creative assembly line with the customer,
which is powered by the continious insights of media buying and thus spits out perfect creatives
non-stop. Creatives are no longer a problem for our customers.

Does it work inatypical fashion categories such as high-priced custom-made products

(wedding dresses)?
We love the high-end of the market! Most of our clients and our best case studies serve the
high-end of the market, and in fact it actually makes our job easier as you’re more easily
differentiated and in most cases gives your brand the margin to scale. (ex: 70% gross margin on a
$50 product is harder to scale than a 40% margin on a $1000 product as the cost per acquisition
usually doesn’t differ linearly).

I don't need everything that is mentioned here?

This is the case for many who diagnose their own business situation. Our self-assessment tends to
focus on the most tangible issues and protects us by voicing our own status quo. This is exactly
why we first talk to our interested parties in a demo and develop a clear roadmap before the start of
the cooperation, which is based on extensivedata insights. So you have a package that suits you
and you don't have anything with that you don't need.

How does recruiting work?

After we have identified the exact positions for you, we are looking for a large number of potential
employees for you. After we pre-screen this, you will only be presented with perfect matches. We
will then place these in your company and train them for you.
Why does your website look so dubious?
Two reasons. 1. We keep things lean, and customer focused: A superbly designed website does not
contribute to the results of our clients. 2. We don't see the value from an economic point of view to
pay 10k for 3 months development time at an overpriced web design agency. Similarly as we don’t
see the point of paying for an expensive office in Central London for that matter, our clients pay for
results, not for the costs of any unnecessary luxeries.

As an agency, can I also become a customer of yours?

Our service is exclusively for fashion brands. If you, as an agency, would like to become our partner
and want to whitelabel our process, write an application with a precise idea of ​yourself and the
expected tyachtenberg@gmail.com to become a white label partner of ours.

Is there an exchange with other brand owners on the same or a higher level?
The key point in working with us is access to a network of 7 & 8-digit founders. The level of support
and community is unseen in the.

What is your long-term goal?

We want to produce help 100+ fashion brands scale to 8-digit across a pan-European and
North/South american geography. Eventually we’re looking to build a tiny holding where we invest
capital in small independent sustainable fashion brands and become their personal partner for
accelerating their business. For this, however, mutual acquaintance must first take place within a
regular business relationship, so we’re looking out for keeping up with our code of honour and
keeping a good reputation with our clients and within the fashion industry as a whole.

Are there other hidden costs?

No hidden costs. Transparency from A-Z is given upfront on our demo call.

Do you guys have a guarantee?

You get the guarantee from me personally that going it alone will take you years longer than working
with us.

You can do the process on your own. However, it can also be implemented with a much higher
probability of success in a fraction of the time.Take all the time you've invested in free content or
hanging out at some fairs and seminars. Do you get an ROI on this time or are you just talking it
up? The truth is:

Implementation rules over Knowledge and Integration rules over Outsourcing, everyday of the
week. Anything else is mental masturbation and won't get you any further.

If you’re curious if your current marketing team can 10x their output, and wondering if it
would be viable to fire your agency and take things in-house, feel free to book in a call with
me personally here: https://www.ecomgrowth.io/ecomgrowth-thanks

Coming SOON: The $0-$3M+/year Thesis

Ecommerce growth is a simple equation: traffic, conversion & retention. In this thesis I will
breakdown the exact practical steps we took to take our partner brands from 0 to $3M/year and
beyond while building them an in-house growth team.

Not only that, I’ll include all the specific insights we learned from doing over 300+ A/B test on a
multitude of brands across different fashion sub-categories.

Pre-requisits

● Strong B2B Wholesaling Backbone (either this, or a validated vertical retail of $1M ARR)

● Unit Economics Make Sense (there is margin after acquisition costs & overhead)

● An Outstanding “Product” (includes both offer & creatives: models, photography & location)

● Strong Brand Positioning

● Brand Differentiation (high-end, drop-model, nichewear, subscription, quality or price

competitor, inclusivity, USP’s, UBT’s, sustainable)
○ You cannot be everything to everyone, you got to understand your target audience
down to the detail, and sometimes you find out your brand/products resonates more
with a completely different audience then you first had in mind upon starting.
○ Your differentiation must make sense to your unique buying tribe. (ex: actively
marketing profit donation to supporting pride month is a noble act, but will not help
your brand if your current customers mostly consists of 40-60 year old corporate
men)
 ○ Tribe positioning: “If I buy this, what does that make me?”
○ Who is your brand? → What do you stand for? What do you NOT stand for?
○ USP’s → UBT’s: Unique Buying Tribe

Phase 1: Doing It Yourself: In House Growth Team (0-$250k/mo)

Faster execution, less mistakes, better delivery by shortening the gap between departments (i.e.
taking mediabuying and creative production in-house).

a. Mediabuying
b. Creatives
c. Influencer Management
d. Email & SMS Marketing
e. Simple CRO tweaks

Phase 2: Doing More: Scaling Up. ($200k-$500k/mo)

Once you’ve brought your marketing in-house, the next phase is all about doing more of what you’re
already doing.

This is where you can scale from $200k/mo to $500k/mo. By now you’ve found a scalable vertical,
the steps in phase two will simply help you scale, without losing to much profitability.

f. Omnipresence
g. Congruency
h. Creatives Hyper optimization
i. Volumizing
j. Advanced CRO practices

Phase 3: Doing It Better: Proffesionalizing ($500k/mo+)

Going beyond $500k/mo doesn’t require adding new things.

Instead, from here it’s all about optimizing and proffesionalizing the things you’re already doing.

k. Optimizing all verticals (A/B testing step 1 & 2 above)

l. UI, UX, CRO, Customer Feedback
m. Ads tracking + scaling verticals
n. General Analytics
Bonus: Becoming a house-hold name. ($10-100M Valuation)
The last step will bring you to becoming a household name, and allow you to get a good multiple if
you’d want an exit or a minority stake from VC.

o. Community
p. Collaborations
q. Operations
r. International

If you’re curious if your current marketing team can 10x their output, and wondering if it
would be viable to fire your agency and take things in-house, feel free to book in a call with
me personally here: https://www.ecomgrowth.io/ecomgrowth-thanks